Suppose that tomorrow you could get in your car, go down to
the gas station, and choose between buying regular gas at $3.12 a gallon, or
methanol at $2.08 a gallon. You
would know that the miles per gallon you get with methanol is only about 2/3 of
what gasoline gives you. But then
you do the math: if methanol is
less than 2/3 the price of gasoline (including taxes), you're ahead
mileage-wise. And sure enough,
two-thirds of $3.12 is $2.08 exactly.
Then you think of all the nice consequences of burning
methanol instead of gasoline.
Almost no carbon monoxide comes out your car's tailpipe when you burn
methanol. Other pollutants
(including carcinogenic aromatic compounds that result from burning gasoline)
are reduced or eliminated, and your carbon footprint per mile is decreased too,
because methanol has fewer atoms of carbon per molecule than gasoline. And every gallon of methanol you burn
is a strike against the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC),
because in the hypothetical methanol economy of the future, most methanol is
made from U. S. fuel sources:
natural gas, coal, or even biomass sources can all be converted into
methanol. Knowing all this, you
choose methanol.
This little tale is more than a pipe dream. The numbers are based on the hard
realities of current gasoline prices at the pump and methanol prices, with
taxes prorated according to the miles-per-gallon capability of the respective
fuels, which would only be fair.
But a lot would have to change in both technology and the regulatory
environment to bring this vision into reality. In a recent issue of The
New Atlantis, author Robert Zubrin promotes the methanol economy as a way
of breaking the petroleum cartel enforced by OPEC, which he estimates make gas
prices about 50% higher than otherwise.
As Zubrin points out, there are other reasons to adopt methanol besides
geopolitical ones, but both technical and legal issues stand in the way of
widespread adoption of methanol as a transportation fuel.
Methanol shares with ethanol a difference in chemistry
between oxygen-bearing compounds such as alcohols and the purely hydrocarbon
nature of gasoline. Unlike
gasoline, methanol is corrosive to the aluminum and steel commonly used in
automotive fuel systems, so a new transportation infrastructure would have to
be developed before methanol could be made widely available at the retail
level. Fortunately, new
"flex-fuel" cars have systems made to handle methanol, ethanol,
gasoline, or a mixture of fuels, so there is no longer a major technical
barrier to making cars that could burn methanol. As Zubrin points out, however, there is a huge legal
barrier: the U. S. Environmental
Protection Agency.
For reasons that seemed good at the time, the EPA adopted
rules some years ago that prohibit the burning of any transportation fuel with
more than a 2.7 percent oxygen content.
Methanol is about 50% oxygen, so the EPA would have to issue a special
waiver of this rule before methanol could be sold as a motor fuel. (It has already done this for the
"E85" ethanol-gasoline mixtures available in some locations.) The EPA also prohibits after-market
modifications of older cars to burn methanol, but this rule could be changed as
well.
I wish the price differential were greater between methanol
and gasoline, because there would then be a powerful economic incentive to
lower the legal and technical barriers to adoption of methanol. As things stand, however, some hidden
economic incentives may be pointing the other way. Zubrin traces lots of money invested in auto companies to
holders of vast OPEC-controlled petroleum investments, and speculates that any
major move away from gasoline-burning cars by the major U. S. automakers would
be squashed by the money-bag guys.
Personally, if I find a situation that can be explained either by (a) a
vast secret conspiracy or (b) ignorance and inertia, I'll go for ignorance and
inertia every time.
The main reason we don't have a methanol economy right now
is that the gasoline economy we have in place is not in an immediate crisis,
and so the red-alert alarm bells that it takes to get the attention of
government officials and elected representatives are silent. The last time this country got really
serious about alternative fuels was back in the early 1980s, when the price of
crude oil spiked at around $100 a barrel (in 2011 dollars). That motivated a spate of energy
research that faded almost as quickly as the price of oil fell. We are almost at that same price now
again, but since it's happened before and we survived, nobody seems to be very
motivated to do much about it this time.
Some readers may recall President George W. Bush's call for
a hydrogen economy during his 2003 state-of-the-union address. That scheme would have had some of the
advantages of the methanol economy, including less pollution and less
dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
But hydrogen, which is the lightest known gas at room temperature, is
devilishly hard to transport and use for transportation, simply because it must
be stored under extremely high pressures or liquefied at extremely cold
temperatures. While these measures
are practical for exotic applications like interplanetary rockets, they were
sufficiently challenging to smother the hydrogen economy in its diapers, so to
speak, even if more politicians than the President had gotten behind it, which
they by and large refrained from doing.
Methanol is much more practical than hydrogen as a motor
fuel, and in fact is used exclusively in many race cars, where its naturally
higher octane rating is an advantage.
I think the biggest single hurdle blocking the way to a methanol-fueled
transportation system is not technical and not legal. It's a lack of leadership. The last time I can recall that a national leader resolved
to do something definite and new, and had the support of most of the nation,
was right after 9/11/2001 when President Bush said we were going into
Afghanistan and whip some you-know-what.
But that state of the national mind lasted about three weeks. Then Bush himself encouraged people to
go shopping and revert to business as usual, and the moment was lost.
Man does not live by bread—or gasoline—or
methanol—alone. There are more
important matters than the health of the economy, but you wouldn't think so by
listening to most political rhetoric nowadays. Zubrin's motivation in calling for a methanol economy is not
strictly economic or technical. He
sees OPEC as a world-class force for evil that needs to be broken up, and I
agree with him. But there are so
many domestic concerns that obsess the political class nowadays that it would
take another 9/11-style crisis to get their attention. And nobody wants that.
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